Tag Archives: Rudy Giuliani

That NY Post Hunter Biden Story: Has Vladimir Lost His Mojo?

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I’m a little worried. Judging by this Rudy Giuliani/New York Post/Hunter Biden fiasco I’m thinking our old pal Vladimir is losing his touch.

I mean, by now I was expecting something a lot more sinister and sophisticated than, you know, another e-mail scandal. People, it’s 2020! Where are the deep fake videos? You know, a slick 4k mash-up with Joe Biden sitting down in his favorite pizza joint in front of an 18″ wood-fired pie of chopped up baby parts and a side dish of Satanic hot sauce?

Instead Vlad wheels out … Rudy Giuliani? The fearsome Russian FSB doesn’t understand that Giuliani is Functioning Adult America’s idea of a sad, over played punchline? As in: truly everyone’s babbling, drunk uncle? As “October surprises” goes, this is just sad. Pathetic even.

It gets really bad when (Murdoch-owned) FoxNews won’t touch a story — presented for your inflammation — by the (Murdoch-owned) Post. Why? Was it the combination of Giuliani’s and Steve Bannon’s and Alex Jones’ fingerprints all over the thing? Or did they have enough inside-the-family intel to know that the guy who wrote the thing demanded his name be taken off it … and that the by-line that finally ran belonged a poor woman who had never before had anything printed in the Post … and only learned her name was attached after it was published? I mean, good lord people. We need better practices nefariousness. This is amateurish.

Now, I’m guessing Vlad is saving his best moves for election day. Namely, as I’ve said before, a series of “ballot irregularities” in key states that aligns with Bill Barr’s judicial philosophy like the gears of a fine luxury sedan. (I’m pleased to see that Team Biden is stashing away cash for the court fight(s) over that inevitability.)

Bad as the Post-Hunter Biden story is, it was predictably inhaled by the right-wing bubble culture. I don’t know why I was surprised. I guess it’s because at this point I was assuming that even they would require something a bit more elegant in their flagrant con jobs. But no. If there was ever any doubt how ill-informed and sealed-off from wider culture the Trump base is, the last semblance evaporated with their whole-hearted, childishly credulous embrace of a story with so many gaping lapses of plausibility. (Here’s the best item-by-item take down I’ve read.)

Pundits and mainstream media oracles are slapping themselves on the back for recognizing … all the red flares shooting off a pile of absurdist bullshit … when they saw it lying right there on the sidewalk in front of them. Good for them, I guess. It is an improvement from 2016’s “even-handed” pursuit of Hillary’s e-mail “scandal.”

Two weeks is always an eternity in a presidential election cycle, and with the combination of Valdimir/Trump/Barr still in the game we remain very much in a kind of super duper, double secret form of eternity.

But I can’t help but wonder what Putin is thinking over there in his sealed up dacha. His investment in Trump paid off with four years of chaos and corruption, and all the international disgrace Trump has brought down on the United States. So it goes without saying he’d like a longer run. More of the same. The complete ruination of NATO for example … and on and on. But did Vlad factor in the full incompetence of Trump? The transparent buffoonery of Rudy Giuliani and the ineptitude of Republican politicians like Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, charged with … making something out of all the drunk uncle theories? I’m thinking, “no.” Being diabolical, Putin would have a hard time imagining such an broad cross-section of idiots.

So, eager as modern Republicans are to play his game, Vlad is going to have to come up with something more clever — by far — than the stale re-run he got out of Rudy and the Post.

It Has Always Been, and Still is About Russia, Stupid.

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In the interest of generating Must See TV I’m delighted to see that House Democrats, i.e. Adam “Shifty” Schiff and “Crazy” Nancy Pelosi, will allow staff/lawyers to question witnesses when the impeachment inquiry hearings go public next month. This at least mitigates the numbing tedium of 20-30 Congress-types preening and fulminating for their five minutes in the international spotlight.

Tight, cross-referenced questioning by practicing attorneys will help Schiff and Pelosi lay out a fuller, more comprehensible story of what the hell has been going on, simplifying things for the easily-distracted and confused general public.

Put another — simpler — way, the carefully strategized and coordinated (re-) questioning of people like Ambassador Bill Taylor, former Ukraine Amnbassador Marie Yovanovich, veteran Russian expert Fiona Hill and yesterday’s witness, Lt. Col. AlexanderVindman — and others — holds great potential to pull the many, varied elements of the Trump corruption saga into a tighter focus, a focus that has always begun and remains on … Russia.

Schiff in particular has long been hip to the all-important “compromised” factor involving Trump and Russia. Namely, as Schiff repeated constantly in the months prior to the Mueller Report, Trump’s money-laundering for Russian gangsters has been a fundamental staple of his personal finances. He owes Putin a lot.

Not a stupid fellow — unlike fellow Californians Kevin McCarthy and Devin Nunes — Schiff has long expressed confidence in the remarkably well-documented if not as yet fully confirmed story of Trump’s deep indebtedness to Putin-approved gangster “investment” in projects all over the world, from Panama to Azerbaijan to Soho (Manhattan). (My apologies for the much-abbreviated list.)

Full confirmation of that corruption — the remaining 2-3% of the story that isn’t demonstrable today — awaits acquisition of Trump’s tax records or interrogation of Trump’s Deutsche Bank handlers — the folks who doled out Russian gangster money to Trump via Deutsche Bank’s “private banking” operation.

The current Pelosi-led strategy to avoid confusing the issue with all that — weird Russian names, off-shore accounts, spy vs. spy vs. spy covert ops and such — is completely understandable.

Having been handed a vividly clear and re-re-re-re-re-corroborated tale of a flagrant, mob-style quid pro quo shakedown of Ukraine, the Democrats have no good tactical reason to cloud public comprehension of the matter with chatter about Oleg Deripaska, Dimitri Firtash and Semion Mogilevic. The latter being the Don Corleone of Russian organized crime and one of the two men, Putin being the other, to whom Firtash would report. Ukrainian oil gangster Firtash being the guy (he posted a $174 million bond as he fights extradition to Chicago for a bribery charge) who has been bankrolling the two Ukrainian goombahs — Lev and Igor. Those two being the farcical duo Trump’s “personal attorney” Rudy Giuliani has been cavorting around with as he tries to convince someone (either Laura Ingraham or Sean Hannity will do) that the Ukrainians and not the peace-loving Russians are the true guilty party in that U.S. election interference stuff. Interference that, if not wholly responsible, was without question directed at putting Donald Trump in the White House.

And so … well you see how quickly the Mario Puzo-deep chain-of-characters narrative roars off into the weeds.

As I’ve said before, unless you follow this story with true, nerd-like obsession, its easily to bewildered. But the point here is that it appears Schiff and Pelosi understand this, and are setting up a public process — a TV spectacle — that cleans up the messy storyline and focuses in, for the easi(er) comprehension of reasonable people, on Trump’s latest but hardly worst act of corruption.

Whether this makes a whit of difference to Senate Republicans or Trump’s base, I have no idea. But as bad as the Taylor-Lewis-Yovanovich-Vindman testimonies have been behind closed doors, nothing gets better when they tell the same stories on national TV. Which is to say and I believe in tipping points. The moment when the craven, mostly-clueless Republican herd makes a 90-degree turn away from the cliff and suddenly sees great, indisputable merit in replacing Trump with a “true conservative”.

Larger point being this: I have faith that Schiff and Pelosi, armed with a deep from the get-go understanding of the entirety of the Russian compromise of Trump, have the means, motive and opportunity to roll Mike Pence (and certainly Mike Pompeo) into this fresh, tight narrative.

Even better for my and your viewing pleasure, the World Series will end tonight and we won’t have to click back and forth between Alex Bregman and Alex Vindman.

The Gun is Smoking and the Shootin’ Has Just Begun

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Happy day after “Smoking Gun Day.”

When it’s all said and done — and it’s a dead certainty that after Ambassador Bill Taylor’s presentation yesterday that something will be done — one the greatest ironies of the Trump era will be how much the demise of his tabloid reign of blunder and vulgarity was the result of him being led around by the exact same kind of wildly implausible right-wing fantasy theories.

We’ll debate for years how much Trump actually believed this latest one, about how the nefarious Ukrainians and not the “very strong and powerful” Russians — were the real culprits in the election meddling of 2016. Not that it even matters if he even thought it was true. But the fact that Rudy Giuliani, working off the FoxNews/talk radio playbook, managed to convince Trump this was an angle with real marketing possibilities, says everything about Trump’s strategic acuity and his sense of the gullibility of his base.

Functionally illiterate in terms of understanding the Constitution and basic rules of presidential behavior, Trump has lived by the sewer-dipped sword of “sigh and gasp” inducing right-wing lunacies. From Obama’s birth certificate, to immigrant invasions, to Hillary’s e-mails and on and on … and on and on, his presidency, if we can even call it that, has been a ceaseless hopscotch back and forth from every bit of ludicrous nutjobbery belched up by conservative America’s most paranoid and cynical circus performers … a profitable shtick fueled by a shrewd assist from Vladimir Putin’s troll farms.

And now Trump is about to die, or at least be impeached, by that same tabloid-crazy sword.

If you’re Trump, the scariest words uttered by anyone in the moments after Taylor dropped his hand grenade on the “no quid pro quo” defense was Mitch McConnell saying, “I don’t recall any conversations with the president about that [Ukrainian] phone call.”

It’s always likely, of course, that Moscow Mitch was lying. He places no great value in public truth-telling. But by in effect saying, “The President is on his own on this one”, McConnell is signaling that the door is fully open to letting this impeachment thing go where it may.

Not that McConnell himself — up for reelection in Kentucky where at last glance he had the lowest approval of any incumbent Senator in the country — would ever vote for conviction. But if you’re someone way smarter than Trump, you’d be explaining to POTUS, when he isn’t getting political advice from “Fox & Friends”, that McConnell is signalling that he will not require his nervous Republican Senate colleagues to vote in lockstep for Trump’s acquittal.

I continue to believe that McConnell is actively considering a Mike Pence presidency. Due diligence requires as much from him. And that he will accept Pence — i.e. allow a Senate conviction of Trump — provided he’s confident the electoral blowback from Trump’s deranged Second Amendment/evangelical/racist base will be minimal, or at least less bad than with Trump on the ticket again in 2020.

That said, one of McConnell’s key tasks when — not if — Pelosi hands him the articles of impeachment, will be to protect his most vulnerable members. Maine’ Susan Collins (second only to McConnell in terms of miserable home-state popularity), Cory Gardner in Colorado, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Martha McSally in Arizona — all up for reelection in 2020 — certainly understand the risk in putting their names to a vote acquitting a now demonstrably corrupt and incompetent Trump.

I have no idea how exactly Mitch will avoid a vote. But based on our long, sordid history with the man, you know he’s got his Federalist Society brain trust working on any permutation, truncation or contortion of the Senate trial process that gets him out of Trump and on to Pence with the least damage to his precious majority.

There are a few trusting souls who believe Chief Justice John Roberts will not put up with a historic dump of McConnell treachery. But me, I prefer to expect the worst.

Anyway, with Ambasador Taylor’s assiduously documented smoking gun, the game of impeachment is fully afoot. Which means it is time … again … to turn to the great Bette Davis …

“Fasten you seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”